


we'll all fake it 'til we forget

by fleurmatisse



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Angels (Supernatural), Angst with a Happy Ending, Friends to Lovers, John Winchester Dies, M/M, Memory Magic, Mentions of John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Witches, oh look it's already a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-11 22:49:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20553968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleurmatisse/pseuds/fleurmatisse
Summary: Dean has never heard of Back Creek,  but Back Creek, and its resident witch-slash-waitress, has definitely heard of him. Now he just has to figure out what the hell he did wrong and maybe get this stupid crow to stop breaking into his motel room without getting himself cursed. This couldn't get complicated or anything.





	1. after

**Author's Note:**

> this fic contains **non-consensual memory magic**, if that may be a trigger, **please see the end note for more detailed (and spoilery) warnings** or message me (here or @ winkingwinchesters on tumblr) and i will try to explain without spoilers
> 
> for the purposes of this fic, pretend mary didn't get killed by azazel but on some other hunt. so the car accident from season 1 is nothing but an accident, no trucker demon involved.

Dean wakes up in a hospital. He doesn’t know how he got there, but the nurse fills him in the second time he wakes up, when he’s no longer freaking out about a breathing tube. Car accident, she says, and he thinks  _ no, that’s not right _ , and then Sam comes in, face bruised all to hell, and he thinks  _ oh _ .

John Winchester is dead. That’s the second thing he learns. They’d finally found him, off on another hunt without telling anybody where he was, and then an 18-wheeler plowed into them and that’s it. Dean wouldn’t have believed it if Sam weren’t the one to tell him.

Sam tried to get Dean to come back to California with him, but Dean is going to lose it, really and truly lose his mind, if he keeps having to look at Sam looking at him like he’s a second from collapsing. He’s fine; he was cleared to leave the hospital, it’s been two weeks since they went to Bobby’s, and he’s  _ fine _ . Sam promises to call and come back the next chance he gets, which Dean uncharitably thinks will probably be another three years, even if he was just the one to turn down the offer to stick together.

Bobby lets him sleep on the couch and work on Baby and doesn’t try to talk to him about John. Dean thanks him by going on food runs and pitching in on particularly obscure research.

It takes him a few days after Sam’s left to notice he’s missing things—a couple shirts, a pair of boots, his favorite Zepplin tape. They weren’t in the car, which could mean they were just thrown out in the impact, although he finds that idea suspect even as it crosses his mind. He dumps the contents of his duffle bag on Bobby’s living room floor and doesn’t find any of the lost items. He does, however, find a crumpled up piece of paper with  _ Back Creek _ written in his own handwriting. He frowns at it. Must’ve been from a hunt, he thinks, and throws it away once he’s packed everything back up.

It takes him two months to get Baby up and running, another month to start hunting again, and a week after that to find another piece of paper he doesn’t remember writing on.  _ 204 Whip-Poor-Will Lane _ , this one says. He traces the letters, and it’s his handwriting, no doubt. He opens a new tab among his slew research and searches the address. The map zooms in on a spot in Virginia. Back Creek, specifically. The address is not far from the creek itself, and when he zooms even further he can see a break in the trees for a building. 

He hasn’t been to Virginia in a while, and he’s never been to Back Creek. He’s never even heard of it. After this hunt, he thinks, and tucks the paper in his dad’s journal. 

Bobby reams him out, as if getting his ass kicked by that shifter wasn’t enough. Dean doesn’t tell him that his mind kept wandering back to Back Creek, because that would only make his decision to head there sound more stupid. He found two notes in his stuff and it’s enough to convince him to go? Even he’s questioning his sanity. 

He does some research beforehand. Back Creek is a farming town, with a perfectly normal history of being normal, which Dean finds suspicious. No major crimes (that’s reserved for the city 30 miles to the east), no serious dips in the production of the farms, not even an out of place weather event. Perfectly, abnormally normal. 

It takes him four days to drive from Boise to Back Creek. He could’ve made it in three, but that shifter really did kick his ass, and the first day of driving was cut short by a headache that just wouldn’t quit. It’s since been sitting dormant in the back of his skull, starting to make its presence known again as he crosses the Virginia state line. He checks into a motel in Harrison, the nearest place to Back Creek with any place to stay, and cuts off the headache with sleep. 

In the morning he heads out again, backtracking toward West Virginia. Back Creek is nestled in a valley with a patchwork of woods and farmland. Most of the houses he passes on his way to Whip-Poor-Will Lane are small and old, spread far apart. There’s one area that could be considered a hub, with a gas station, feedstore, and diner on various corners of the only intersection that’s had a stop light so far. He’s the only one at the light, but there are a few vehicles in the diner’s lot, two beat-up trucks and a brown station wagon. He considers pulling in—it’s probably the best place around here to get the lowdown on everything—but the light changes and the only other car on the road pulls up behind him, so he keeps going. 

He misses the turn onto Whip-Poor-Will the first time, turns around in the long driveway of a church, and wishes he wasn’t driving Baby as soon as he gets on the lane. There’s gravel lining the ditches on either side, and the road itself is uneven as all hell. Dean drives grandma-slow over the worst of the potholes, gritting his teeth as he’s jostled around. 

A mile in, he spots a mailbox. He triple checked the ownership of 204 Whip-Poor-Will Lane, and everything told him it was unowned, not even for sale. The mailbox looks like it was put up two days ago, straight and clean with a clear  _ 204 _ in black paint on the side. He pulls into the driveway hoping whoever secretly owns this place isn’t about to fill him with buckshot for trespassing.

The drive up to the house—a single story, wood-sided place—is easier on Baby’s tires than the actual road. There’s still gravel down, and where it’s missing it’s been taken over by grass. Dean parks, and he hasn’t seen anyone with a shotgun yet, so he shuts off the engine and gets out of the car.

It’s silent.

Dean turns to scan the woods, and the rustle of his jacket sounds like a bomb going off, it’s so quiet. He can’t see anyone or anything, but he checks his gun in his waistband and his knife in his boot before he walks toward the house through a weed-filled yard. There’s a small porch, sagging in the middle, that creaks when he stands on it. He knocks on the door—just in case—and when no one answers, he peers in the windows. His view is blocked by curtains.

He tries the doorknob, but it’s locked. 

The only thing out of place is the silence. No birds or bugs yelling at each other, no rustling from the trees. It could just be his intrusion, the roar of Baby’s engine silencing everything else. There’s no reason for him to try and get in this house. He grabs his lockpick anyway.

The lock clicks after a minute of him fiddling with it. He turns the doorknob, and the door doesn’t open. He pushes harder, jams his shoulder into the wood, but it doesn’t budge. He didn’t miss a deadbolt or anything. It just won’t open. He gives it a half-hearted kick. The door remains impartial to his attempts, but something white flutters down in front of his face. He watches it land on the porch—a small square of paper, dots of ink leaking through the side facing up. 

Dean glances around to make sure nothing’s going to jump him when he bends over and when he doesn’t spot anything, he grabs the paper and turns it over. His own handwriting greets him again.  _ Daphne’s Diner,  _ it says this time. The diner he passed on the way here. He looks around again, waiting for the joke or the killing blow, but he’s alone, and it’s quiet, and he doesn’t remember this place at all, so how the  _ hell _ did something he wrote get here?

Clutching the paper, Dean speedwalks to his car, throws it into gear, and gets the hell out of there.

He doesn’t go to the diner. How much more obvious could a trap be? He goes back to the motel and grabs his shit and drives out of town. It’s gotta be some kind of trickster. Maybe that shifter had a friend that’s turned itself into Dean and wants revenge. While wearing his face? Does handwriting transfer to shifters? Dean shakes his head before he goes down a mental rabbithole and pulls into a gas station across the Pennsylvania state line. 

He’s overreacting. It could be someone else’s handwriting on the notes, close enough to his that he can’t tell the difference. God that’s stupid. 

“Yeah,” Bobby says when he answers the phone. 

“You ever hear of something that leaves notes for its victims in the victims’ own handwriting?” Dean asks. 

Bobby is quiet for a second. “No, nothing comes to mind.”

“What about anything in Back Creek, Virginia?” Dean asks, trying his best not to feel like an idiot. He’d checked. He’d  _ checked _ . 

“Dean,” Bobby says, a sigh hidden somewhere under his voice. “I’ve asked everyone I know who’s been within a hundred miles of the place. No one’s ever found anything in Back Creek.”

Dean stops breathing. “Right,” he says. “Right, sorry, I saw something in Dad’s journal—again, I saw it again—and I thought I’d ask. Get an update.”

“Uh huh,” Bobby says, in that tone Sam kept using in the days following Dean’s release from the hospital. “Are you feelin’ alright, Dean? You sure that shifter didn’t scramble your brain?”

“I’m great!” Dean says. “Thanks, Bobby, talk to you later!”

He hangs up before Bobby can say anything, presses his hands to his face, and blows out a noisy breath. So he’s already asked Bobby about Back Creek. He hasn’t found mention of it in his dad’s journal, but he did find a note apparently to himself to go to a place with no monsters that he has no memory of. He finds the latest note in his jacket pocket, crumpled and a little smudged from his death grip. Daphne’s Diner. It’s not that far from where he’s stopped, and he supposes it’s good to be aware that he’s actually going insane this time as he aims the car back toward Virginia. 

There are a different set of cars in the diner’s parking lot when Dean returns. He can see a few people through the wall of windows, and they turn to look at him when he walks in. One half of the couple in the back smiles and waves at him. He waves back, finds a seat as the hostess directs him, and observes. It’s a 50s style diner, with a jukebox and everything, and the staff are dressed to match the light blue walls. It almost feels familiar, but it also looks like every other retro diner he’s been to. 

“What can I get for you, honey?” the waitress asks, notepad poised to take his order. Her name tag declares her Cheryl. 

Dean smiles up at her. “What would you recommend, Cheryl?”

She smiles back stiffly. “Are you lookin’ for breakfast or lunch?”

“Let’s go with lunch,” Dean says, keeping his voice cheerful but laying off the vague idea to flirt. 

“Then you can’t beat the patty melt. Comes with the best fries you’ll get this side of the Mississippi.”

“Sounds great,” Dean says.

“And to drink?” Cheryl asks, not looking up from her notepad. 

“A coke, please. Thank you.”

“You got it, sweet pea,” Cheryl says, and hightails it away from his table. She stops to talk to the hostess and then disappears into the kitchen. The hostess is the one to bring him his drink. Dean doesn’t think he’s ever offended someone so much by using their name. Maybe he has been here before. 

Cheryl returns to deliver his food with a curt  _ enjoy _ . He thanks her retreating form, takes a bite of the patty melt, and the next thing he knows he’s in the middle of a fire. 

His breath catches—or is caught by the fire—and when he turns his head to cough, he’s back in the diner. 

He blinks. The diner stays in place around him. He lifts his patty melt to eye level, inspecting it for any sign of tampering, but it’s just a sandwich, and his fries are just fries. He takes a small, experimental bite. Nothing happens, and nothing continues to happen as he eats more until his plate is clear and the hostess—Melissa—brings him the check. He pays and leaves, and, on his way to the town where he’d gotten the motel, he has to pull over to puke up all the lunch he just ate.

As a point of pride, Dean does not get food poisoning, so he’s pretty sure he’s been straight up poisoned when he can barely make it through the motel check-in process without throwing up again. He followed his own breadcrumb trail just to wind up poisoned and shaking in a motel bathtub, clutching a trash can to his chest in case he can’t lean over to the toilet in time. He clenches his jaw against a wave of nausea, shutting his eyes. 

Flames surround him, and he can’t move, at least not very far. There’s a ring of grass around his feet, barely big enough to allow a step in any direction. He lifts a hand to shield his eyes, squinting through the fire at a figure on the other side. The fire spikes before he can make it out and he—

—hits his head on the wall as he rears back in an attempt not to get singed. The movement turns his stomach. He takes shallow breaths. Over the rushing in his ears, he hears the door to the motel open. Perfect. That poisoning bitch is probably here to finish him off. 

He can’t hear any footsteps on the carpet, but he can hear a rustling. He grabs his gun off the edge of the tub, aims it at the door where a chest would be. The doorknob turns, the door opens, and— 

No one’s there. 

A shadow shifts, and he’s aiming his gun at a crow as it hops through the doorway. It squawks at him, stopping to puff up its feathers like it’s offended. He stares at it. Is he hallucinating? A tsunami of nausea hits him, and he scrambles for the trash can, trying to keep an eye on the bird as he retches. It takes the opportunity to get closer, talons clicking across the tile. Dean lifts his gun again, and it stops, croaking out another offended squawk. 

“One step closer—” He spits, not breaking eye contact with the crow. “—and you’re gonna be nothing but feathers.”

The crow turns its head, looking at him with one beady eye. It sits and starts preening its chest feathers. Dean has to be hallucinating. He can’t stop the next gag that works its way up his throat, or the crow as it flies up from the floor to land on the hand holding his gun. Its talons press into his skin but don’t break through until he tries to shake it off. It makes a shrill noise right in his ear. He grabs for it, and it hops up his arm, making the shrill noise on every hop, leaving scratches in its wake.

Dean stops, and the bird does the same, wings still held out as it grips his shirt just under his shoulder. He practically goes cross-eyed looking at it this close. If he tries to shoot it, he’ll probably end up getting his own arm. It clicks its beak, alternating eyes to stare down at him, and then sticks one of its legs out at him. He looks at it, and finds a small bundle of weeds tied to its leg. He looks up at the crow. It clicks again.

“I’m not touching that,” he tells it. It swipes its beak down and breaks the string. While Dean is trying to brush all of the weeds away, it yanks out a clump of his hair. “Ow! You fucking—”

It flies out of the room before he can shoot it. He presses his palm to the top of his head where it grabbed his hair, and at least that isn’t bleeding. His hand, however, has seen better days.

“Fucking freak bird,” he spits, shaking his cut hand. He gets out of the bathtub to rinse all the bird germs out of the cuts, and it’s not until the blood is washed away that he notices. He doesn’t feel sick anymore. 

It wasn’t the bird. He refuses to believe it was the bird. The poison—foodborne or otherwise—had simply run its course. Even though he was still covered in sweat and had just been puking his guts out. It was not the bird. He grabs the plants from the tub and the smell of mint hits him. He crushes one of the leaves, and yeah, that’s mint. So the bird brought him mint. What the fuck does that mean?

He sits at the kitchenette’s rickety table with his phone and types  _ mint  _ into Google. All that comes up is some software so he amends his search to  _ mint meaning _ and then tacks on  _ witchcraft  _ for shits and giggles because sometimes the internet does produce something useful for hunting. He scrolls through sketchy looking links and finds a blurb that says  _ used to break hexes or curses _ , which he thinks should have come up somewhere in his hunting life before now. The website, when he clicks on it, seems legit. 

He was already considering a curse; poisoning doesn’t really explain all the fire shit. The question is how he was cursed. He searches through his jacket for a hex bag and when he turns up nothing, he goes out to his car. Maybe while he was eating, someone slipped something in the wheel well or under the fender. That’s a bust, too, and while he no longer feels sick, his body is not up for moving so much yet. He goes back into the motel room, triple checks that the door is locked, and crashes on the bed.

He’s standing in the woods. It’s dark, and he’s small, holding a gun that feels too heavy in his hand. He shouldn’t be out here. Dad will be mad if he comes back and Sammy’s alone. But Dean had heard something, saw a light, and he wasn’t about to let whatever it was get inside. 

He hunches down as he sees the light again, and his shirt catches in the nearest sticker bush. He holds his breath as the thorns dig into his skin. The light darts between the trees in front of him, shoots up into the branches before it falls to the ground again and explodes, sparks flying into the air. Dean watches one land on a branch and ignite. 

A tapping noise wakes him up. He grabs his gun and aims it at the noise, which is coming from the door, a consistent string of taps. He gets up, still wearing his shoes, and walks over. The tapping stops. He holds the gun up to the door as he checks the peephole. There’s nothing there. He looks around as much as he can before he cracks the door open, and on the ground in front of his room is a dead mouse.

A rough caw has him snapping his head up, and the crow is looking down at him from one of the trees across the parking lot. It caws again, shuffling down the branch. Dean resists the urge to shoot it—reminds himself that it might have helped him. He looks at the dead mouse. There’s something under it. The crow caws a third time, edging toward that shrill sound again. 

Dean hates his life. 

He pushes the mouse with the toe of his boot until he can grab the piece of paper beneath it. There’s an indent that Dean assumes is from the crow’s mouth. He unfolds it delicately, glancing up at the crow to make sure it’s staying on that side of the parking lot. The handwriting on the inside is chicken scratch. 

“Crow scratch,” he mutters to himself. He squints at it until it starts to make sense. “‘ _ Vida wanted to apologize for your—’ _ ...Aim?” Dean squints harder, turning the paper. “Oh, ‘ _ arm _ .  _ I could not dissuade her from the mouse.’ _ ”

The crow has gotten two branches lower. It—she?—makes a quieter cawing noise. Dean frowns at it. He’s heard of cats leaving dead things, but crows?

“Uh, I appreciate the gesture,” Dean tells the crow, feeling stupid as all hell for talking across a parking lot to an oversized pigeon. “But I’m gonna pass on the mouse. You can have it.”

The crow swoops over and lands at Dean’s feet, tearing into the mouse.

“Oh, that’s gross.”

The crow doesn’t seem to care. Dean looks at the note to avoid the carnage taking place on the sidewalk. It looks like it was written in ballpoint pen, on printer paper, and it was delivered by a crow. He chances a glance at the crow, and the mouse has been devoured. 

“If I gave you a note, would you take it back to whoever sent this one?” he asks. The crow flies up to the railing and tips forward. “Is that a yes?”

It tips forward again, adds a click of its beak. Dean decides to take that as a full-body nod. 

“Okay, I’ll be right back,” he says, slipping inside before the bird can follow. Vida, apparently. He finds a notepad and pen on the counter and tears off a page below the motel’s logo, as if that will keep the mystery probably-witch from knowing where he is. He gets as far as putting the pen to the paper before his brain catches up to what he’s doing and provides a big blank. He has no idea what to write.

He taps the back of the pen on the counter, staring at the door like he can see the bird through it and that’ll give him some clue. He puts the pen back to the paper.  _ I’d send thanks for the mint if I knew who it was going to.  _

He folds the paper and takes it out to the bird, who snatches it from his hand before he even holds it out and flies away. Dean watches it until it disappears and wonders what the hell he just did. 

It had to be the waitress who cursed him. Maybe the hostess was in on it too, but Cheryl, however she knows him, would have been the driving force. He isn’t sure how she did it without a hex bag, so he calls Bobby. He doesn’t intend to fill him in on  _ everything _ , but he finds the words spilling out of his mouth anyway. It sounds even more ridiculous when he hears it out loud. 

“What the hell have you gotten yourself into, boy?” Bobby says when Dean’s done, sounding like he’s already digging around for the right books. 

Dean laughs helplessly. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking you.”

Bobby says he’ll get back to Dean as soon as he finds anything, and also, “Don’t go getting yourself cursed again.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says. “Thanks, Bobby.”

Bobby hangs up with a vaguely harassed hum. Dean tucks his phone in his jacket pocket and returns his focus to the parking lot of the diner. Baby’s parked down the road, half hidden around a curve, and Dean’s staking the place out from a spot in the woods that surround the whole town. He’s waiting for Cheryl to leave, so he can follow her, which is basically begging to get himself cursed again, but he’s not about to sit around when the witch herself is right there. He only has to wait another twenty minutes before she’s walking out of the diner, folding her apron over her arm. 

Dean watches her cross the lot and turn down the road away from him, staying in the grass beside the asphalt. She disappears around another turn. Dean apologizes to Baby as he emerges from the woods. He’ll have to come back and get her later. 

It’s not the best environment to tail someone in. For one thing, being surrounded by woods means there are approximately a billion twigs to step on and alert Cheryl to his presence. For another, if anyone sees him, there’s a high likelihood they’ll call the cops on the weird drifter following the nice waitress down the road at dusk. He can’t really believe Cheryl hasn’t noticed him yet. He has to stay closer than he wants in order to keep her in his sight; on any given curve, she could just happen to glance his way and he’ll be up a creek.

They’ve been walking for about two miles when Cheryl stops at a mailbox. Dean makes a quick sidestep behind the cover of an oak tree and peers out to see her shuffling through mail and walking up the driveway. He loses sight of her a few seconds later, but he makes a mental note of the name and number on the mailbox ( _ JENKINS 455 _ ). He waits another five minutes, tries to get a look at the house itself, but Cheryl doesn’t come back down, and the brush between the trees is too thick for Dean to get a glimpse of the house he can only assume is hers. 

When he gets back to Baby, the crow is waiting on the side mirror.

“Hey!” Dean exclaims. The crow puffs up at him as he waves it away. “Off the car!”

The crow responds by flying up to his shoulder and cawing in his ear. He sighs and waits as it takes the rolled up paper off its leg and holds it out to him. He takes it and leans against Baby as he tries to read it in the fading light. It’s just as messy as the first note, its only improvement being that he did not have to move a dead mouse off it first. 

_ who I am is not a matter of consequence and thanks are not necessary. you would not have died without my intervention only been miserable until you left back creek behind _

Dean frowns at the paper. If the curse was location-based, shouldn’t it have stopped when he reached Harrison? Or does Cheryl consider that Back Creek, too? 

The crow shifts on his shoulder, getting even closer to his head. He leans his head as far from it as he can. 

“If you rip out my hair again, I’m chucking you across the road like a football,” he warns it. 

The crow clicks its beak and settles at the crook of his neck, feathers tickling the skin above his collar. It doesn’t make a move for his hair. He cautiously returns his head to an upright position, waits a few seconds to make sure the bird has no sinister intentions, and allows himself to relax a fraction. The crow is so close, he’s pretty sure he can hear its heartbeat. He catches himself finding it soothing and pushes the idea away. There is nothing soothing about having a feathered fleabag this close to his face. 

He doesn’t particularly want to lean in to his car to find a new piece of paper with the crow on his shoulder; in fact, he’s pretty sure that would just extend the scratches already making his arm itch under his sleeve. He has a pen in his pocket and turns to write a response on the back of the note with Baby acting as a clipboard. 

_ I had already left Back Creek when you intervened. And this isn’t a Rumpelstiltskin thing, is it? If I have to guess names, can you at least tell me man or woman? _

He pockets his pen and rolls the note back up, holding it up for the crow. It makes no move to take it. He waves it around for a second before chancing a poke to the bird’s chest. It jumps, makes a rumbling noise, and settles back down, feet digging in momentarily as if to say it is not leaving.

“You can’t just stay on my shoulder,” Dean says, poking it again. It clicks at him, resolute. Last time he tried to grab it, it scratched the shit out of him. He pockets the note and goes for logic. “Look, I have to get off this road. You don’t want to be stuck in a car. Do you?”

The crow doesn’t move. Dean rubs a hand over his face, leaving it over his eyes. This is ridiculous. It’s a bird. He could absolutely chuck it across the road.

“I don’t think you’ll fit on my shoulder in the car,” he says. “So if you want to go for a ride, you have to get down.”

The crow stays in place for another second and then starts shuffling down Dean’s arm, stopping again around his elbow as if to make sure he isn’t going to leave it behind as soon as it disembarks. Dean lets himself be annoyed that his plan was foiled by a bird and then opens the door.

“You’d better not shit in here,” he tells it as he gets in, keeping his arm up with some difficulty—the bird is not a lightweight. The crow hops down onto the seat as he sits, walks to the window, and comes back as he shuts the door to hop up on his lap. “Now hang on a second,” he says, but the bird has already settled again, a puff of black leaning against his stomach with its beady eyes closed. 

It peeks up at him, very clearly not asleep, and then hunkers down further. Dean can reach around it to drive easily enough. He sighs again and puts his keys in the ignition.

Dean thinks the crow is actually asleep by the time they get to Harrison. He parks in front of his room at the motel and watches it take slow breaths, barely visible in the light from the vacancy sign. He lifts a hand to poke it awake, pauses an inch away from its back, and strokes his finger down its back instead. It puffs a little, then goes back to a peaceful shadow when he pets her again. Dean has to get out of the car. He jostles her a little.

“Bird,” he says. She doesn’t open her eyes. “Vida. That’s your name, right? Vida, you gotta get up.”

Vida fluffs her feathers and shuffles her feet, peering up at Dean with narrowed eyes.

“Yeah, I don’t like getting woken up either,” Dean says, almost laughing at the affronted look he’s receiving. “But I’m not gonna sit in my car all night so you can sleep on me.”

Vida clicks at him, hopping up on the arm that reaches to open the door. She claws her way up to his shoulder again once he’s out of the car. He gets all the way to unlocking the motel room door before he resigns himself to having a crow sleep on him all night, but when he walks in the room, Vida hops down to the counter and makes no move to get back on his shoulder. He flicks on the light and watches her explore as he shucks his jacket and boots.

Vida flies from the counter to the table, feet skidding on the surface so she has to keep flying or fall to the floor. She lands on the lamp beside the bed, the shade tilting dangerously under her weight. She climbs up to the high side and sits, looking at Dean.

“Comfy?” he says, and she rumbles at him. He nods, locks himself in the bathroom, and wonders what he did in his life to make this a thing that’s happening. 

It’s barely nine o’clock, but he finds himself worn out anyway. When he comes back out to the main room, Vida looks like she’s sleeping again. He turns off the light, tucks his gun under his pillow, and falls asleep on top of the covers again.

He dreams of dark hair and quiet laughter. The shape of the person is nebulous. Dean can’t pin them down, but he laughs with them and steals a kiss and lets the world drift by in a haze. He’s comfortable. Happy. He sighs.

Vida is gone when Dean wakes up. He has no idea how she got out, since he’s pretty sure bird feet would have trouble turning a doorknob, but he still doesn’t know how she got in the first time either. It’s still dark, hours before the sun will show its face, but Dean’s gotten as much sleep as he’s gonna get. He makes himself some shitty motel coffee and sits down at the table with his laptop to see what he can find about Cheryl Jenkins.

By the time Bobby calls him, the sun is up, his stomach is rumbling, and he’s pretty sure he’s walked himself right into a pit of witchy spikes.

“No hex bag means she’s getting her juice from something else,” Bobby tells him. “Demon probably, maybe a god.”

“Well that’s fan-damn-tastic,” Dean replies with false cheer. “I found out she probably killed her husband.”

“You want me to send someone out there?” Bobby asks.

“I got it,” Dean says, just as there’s a tapping on the door. He recognizes the noise from Vida’s second appearance and gets up. “I’ll let you know if something else comes up.”

“Be careful,” Bobby says. “I still haven’t found any omens or god signs, so you better be ready for both.”

“I got it,” Dean repeats. “Talk to you later, Bobby.”

“You better,” Bobby grumbles. 

The call ends, and Dean opens the door. Vida is perched on the railing, cawing lowly at him. 

“You wanna tell me how you keep opening this door?” he asks. She shakes her feathers, eyeing him with a tilted head. There’s a paper tied to her leg again, and she holds it out when Dean reaches for her. He watches her as he unrolls it. “Trade secret, huh?”

She clicks her beak. Dean catches himself smiling at her and turns his attention to the note. It’s written in red ink this time, still a ballpoint pen and still just printer paper. He thinks he deciphers it more quickly this time, though, so either the handwriting is getting neater or he’s getting used to it. 

_ I am not asking for your firstborn _ , it says, and it takes Dean a second to remember his own fairy tale reference,  _ or anything in return my only advice is for you to forget this place before you get hurt _

That’s ominous, Dean thinks, despite what he had found in his deep dive into Cheryl Jenkins. The only death not related to age or illness that he’d found was directly connected to her: her husband, Bill died in ‘96, dragged into the creek while he was driving home. Dean couldn’t find anyone else who died in the floods that were apparently such a common occurrence they weren’t even reported on by the Harrison paper anymore. Both things are suspicious enough to put him on edge.

A god, Bobby had suggested. Bodies of water seem like something a god might control. If that’s true, he’s probably more fucked than if Cheryl’s shacking up with a demon.

And he’s still not sure what he has to do with anything anyway—maybe whatever was powering her tipped her off that he was a hunter and that was enough, or maybe he’s already been here as a hunter and she cursed him to forget. He doesn’t think either of those explain the fire he kept seeing. If he set one here, there’s no record of it, and there’s no record of Cheryl outside of Back Creek. 

Unless she somehow found out about his mom, enough to know she died in a fire, but not enough to know it was in a house and not a field. That almost seems more ridiculous than Dean forgetting his past excursion here.

He’s not entirely sure how to proceed, not until they figure out where she’s getting her power from, at least. Maybe Dean can scope out her house while she’s at work—but what are the odds she doesn’t have some kind of magical protections. Even Dean has protections over his car; Bobby has plenty scattered around the house, and last time Dean was at Sam’s apartment, he saw the barest hint of sigils in the paint around the doors and windows. So breaking and entering is probably a bad idea. 

He looks at the note. Forget this place. It’s tempting. He’s really not looking to get killed, despite what Bobby or Sam sometimes imply. But if Cheryl went after him unprompted, she’s got something to hide, and if she’s got something to hide, well, more than likely, Dean’s got something to hunt.

Vida grabs his attention with a loud caw. Dean looks up, startled, and watches her snap her beak toward his hands.

“You’re waiting for an answer?” he says. She does her full body bird nod. Dean doesn’t have a pen on him. “Hang on,” he tells her, and ducks back inside. He writes on the back of this note again.

_ You never said man or woman, so I guess I’ll start with unisex names. Taylor? Alex? Morgan? _

He takes the note back to Vida, who nips at his fingers before taking it and flying away. He watches her go, and an idea strikes him. It’s not a great idea, considering he doesn’t even have shoes on, but he latches on to it nonetheless. Half a minute later, he’s rushing out to his car and driving the direction he saw Vida go. Maybe, if he can’t confront Cheryl, he can confront this mystery witch who decided to help him.   
Unsurprisingly, Dean loses sight of Vida. She has the advantage of flying over and through the woods while Dean and his car are confined to the road. He would have trailed her on foot, but he’s already seen how fast she can disappear. He’s already halfway to Back Creek, so he follows that bad idea and keeps going. He has the fleeting hope that Cheryl won’t notice him driving past the diner, but Baby is not particularly inconspicuous, so that hope shifts into her being too busy at the diner to be able to do anything to him. 

Whip-Poor-Will Lane is just as awful when Dean reaches it this time, already slowing to deal with the ruts carved deep by the rain. He doesn’t make it to the house again, because the house isn’t there. In its place is a rectangular pit, the remnants of its basement, surrounded by charred earth and hunks of charcoal that sort of still look like tree trunks. 

Dean parks on what used to be the driveway and gets out of the car. 

Silence. A stillness to the air verging on suffocating. The smell of dirt and ash and something acrid hiding underneath.

He turns in place, and the woods that had been so close before are burned away on every side. It’s only been a day since he was here, and he didn’t see smoke yesterday. The Harrison Post never ran an article about a fire. Did he do this?

Across the road, where the woods are hardly singed, Dean catches something moving. He faces it, one hand on his gun under his shirt. It’s getting closer, but he can’t decipher its shape until it’s standing on the edge of the bank. A deer, halfway out in the open, stares at him. He watches its ears twitch as if there’s something to be heard, and there’s something wrong, he thinks. He frowns, grip tightening on the gun. A smattering of flies have gathered on the deer’s nose, and it shakes them away, eyes closing for a brief moment. Dean places the weirdness when it opens them again.

Rather than black, this deer’s eyes are a cloudy blue with white spiderwebbing over its pupils. At first Dean had accepted it as a reflection, but as it moves its head, the shapes don’t change. The deer, with spots still visible on its back, doesn’t seem old enough for cataracts. It keeps looking at Dean with its twitching ears, and Dean keeps looking back, even though he’s not sure it can even see him. He takes a step to the side, and the deer tracks him easily. A second later it loses interest and disappears back into the woods, leaving Dean standing in a circle of ash.

It isn’t a smart idea to go back to the diner, but Dean can’t think of any other way he’s supposed to get answers. However Cheryl had cursed him, she was showing him that fire—Dean is sure of it. And the witch who broke the curse said it wasn’t fatal, only a warning. And that he should leave before he gets hurt, but Dean is choosing to ignore that part in the hopes that he can convince Cheryl to talk to him rather than immediately curse him again.

As he walks into the diner, there’s only one other person. They’re tucked back in a booth by the kitchen doors, head of dark hair bowed over their hands. Dean catches himself walking over and turns abruptly to the counter. The kitchen doors swing open before he has a chance to sit on a stool, and Cheryl manages to get a professional mask over her glare in a split second.

“Back again,” she says, standing on the opposite side of the counter with her hands in fists resting against the edge.

“Back again,” Dean agrees. He glances back toward the person in the booth, who’s still hunched. Dean can see them turning a pale hand just above the table. “I had a question for you, actually.”

“Shoot,” Cheryl says, sounding like that’s exactly what she’d like to do to Dean. He imagines she’d still be wearing the pleasant smile currently plastered to her face. 

“That house out on Whip-Poor-Will Lane,” Dean says, and Cheryl’s fists tighten. “What happened to it?”

“There was a fire a few months ago,” Cheryl says. “Arson, actually.”

Dean feels his stomach drop. “They ever catch the guy that did it?”

“That’s two questions,” Cheryl points out, but she adds, pleasant as anything, “No, unfortunately, they didn’t. He got away with it. I was hoping he’d have to pay for it.”

Dean looks toward the booth again. The diner isn’t really that big, and the radio isn’t loud enough to drown out a conversation. He braces himself and turns back to Cheryl, who also looks away from the person in the booth to meet Dean’s eyes. 

“Is there somewhere we could talk?” Dean asks, voice low. He pitches it even lower to add, “I’m not looking to get cursed again, if I can help it. At least not until I know what I did to deserve it.”

Cheryl studies him with a stony gaze. She’s not quite as tall as him, but the look makes him feel small, like a kid facing a disappointed parent. She nods. “Outside.”

Dean lets himself be stupid for a minute to hopefully show he doesn’t actually mean any harm. He walks out first, Cheryl not far behind, and makes sure his hands stay away from his gun.

“It wasn’t you,” Cheryl says once they’re facing each other just to the right of the door, arms crossed over her chest. Dean gets a second to feel surprised relief before she ruins it. “It was your daddy. And your brother, but I think he was mostly a distraction. No matches lit.”

Dean can’t stop the shock from rolling over his face fast enough to keep Cheryl from seeing it. She looks slightly less annoyed, slightly more sympathetic. 

“Why?” Dean asks. Sam has settled in California; he would never go back to hunting with Dad. Unless—

“Some dumbass attempt to  _ save you _ ,” Cheryl tells him with a snort. She catches him shifting out of his carefully relaxed stance and looks fully annoyed again. “You have never been in any danger here.”

“Right, that’s why you cursed me,” Dean replies. 

“I cursed you because  _ you _ are the danger,” Cheryl snaps, waving an angry hand at him as she steps forward. He steps back automatically, and she follows until she can jab him in the chest with an accusing finger. “Every time you come back,  _ I’m _ left picking up the pieces. We don’t  _ want _ you here, Dean Winchester.”

“Every time,” Dean echoes in the pause Cheryl leaves. He watches her anger flicker toward something else, too quick to read. “How many times have I been here?”

“Plenty,” Cheryl grits out. “And this better be the last.”

She leaves him dazed outside the diner, the door slamming behind her without her even touching it. Dean tries to follow her and finds himself unable to get any closer to the door. It’s like he’s trying to stick the wrong ends of two magnets together. He watches through the wall of windows as Cheryl sits beside the person in the booth, runs a hand through their hair until it gets batted away. _ We _ . 

Dean gets in his car and drives back toward Harrison. Then he stops, parks Baby where he left her last night, and walks back to the woods catty-corner from the diner to wait. 

He had been working on the assumption that he’d been here before—why else would he have notes about it?—but he’d thought it was a one-off. He came here on a case, pissed off Cheryl either incidentally or with the hunt, and left.  _ Plenty _ could have bolstered that belief. But  _ every time _ . Dean thinks that means a lot more than once. 

He has to wait until after the lunch rush, ignoring his own hunger in favor of staring at the diner, but Cheryl walks out, apron folded over one arm and the person from the booth holding the other. Dean still can’t tell if they’re a man or a woman, but he can see they’d be taller than Cheryl if they weren’t hunching. Dean waits until they’re almost out of sight to trail after them. 

They’re slower than Cheryl walked on her own, taking almost twice as long, but they both end up at the driveway. Dean freezes when he sees the dark shape on the mailbox. 

A crow. Vida. She hops from the mailbox to Cheryl to Cheryl’s companion, who stops and pulls her off their shoulder, cradling her like a baby. She nips at their nose. Dean is too far away to hear more than voices—Cheryl’s first, scolding, and then her companion, deep and scolding right back. Cheryl shakes her head and walks up the driveway, leaving her companion talking to Vida at the end of the driveway. Dean watches them, and there’s something about them; he can’t place it, but there’s a part of his brain that encourages him to look closer to figure it out.. Then they look up. 

Directly at Dean. 

Dean darts behind a tree. Stupid, stupid, this was a stupid idea. He waits for the sound of footsteps, to be found by who he can only assume is the witch that doesn’t even want to share their name, but they never come. He takes a chance and peeks out around the trunk.

There’s nobody in the driveway. No movement in the woods.

Dean could confront them. Walk right up the driveway and demand a name, a reason they helped him but still associate with Cheryl. They were familiar, he thinks. They’ve met before, they had to. They know him. He flees.

When he gets back to Harrison, he calls Sam, because he can’t ask their dad what happened and even if he could, the man would probably refuse to answer. Dean wasn’t involved, but Sam was. Apparently Dean doesn’t call Sam enough, because when he answers, he sounds worried already.

“Dean?”

“No, it’s the tooth fairy,” Dean says. Before Sam can do more than huff his annoyance, Dean throws out, “Were you hunting with Dad a few months ago?”

Sam is quiet for a damning few seconds. “No, I wasn’t hunting with Dad,” he says. Liar.

“Really,” Dean says, flat.

“I  _ wasn’t _ ,” Sam insists. “I was looking for  _ you _ .”

Dean frowns. “Why would you be looking for me?”

“Because Dad hadn’t heard from you in months!” Sam says. “He said you went hunting on your own and you weren’t answering your phone or calling him back.”

Dean frowns harder. That isn’t right. “ _ We _ were looking for  _ Dad _ ,” he says, not sure why Sam is trying to convince him otherwise. “We’d just found him when we got in the accident.”

Sam is quiet for a long minute. “Dean, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Dad and I had just found you.”

“Where?” Dean asks. Don’t say it, he thinks.

“Back Creek,” Sam says easily. “I don’t know what you were doing back; you wouldn’t tell me.” When Dean doesn’t respond, he says, less sure, “We stayed there a few times growing up. In that house in the woods, remember?”

Dean is glad he’s already sitting down. He presses his free hand to his eyes until he sees spots. “No,” he says. “I don’t remember it at all.”

Sam wants him to meet him at Bobby’s at the end of the week, the first chance Sam has to fly out. That gives Dean three days to figure out what the hell is going on without him. A distraction, Cheryl had called him. But a distraction for who?

He gets a note from Vida an hour after he gets off the phone with Sam, when he’s gotten back from grabbing a late lunch.  _ my name is not taylor or alex or morgan _ , it says. Dean doesn’t know how to respond, so he doesn’t, and lets Vida stay in the room, alternating between pecking at him for attention and digging through everything she can get her beak in while he tries to find any mention of Back Creek in his dad’s journal. 

By the time he goes to sleep, Vida is roosting on the lamp again, and he’s got nothing that tells him what he or his dad were doing here.

He’s in the woods again. It’s day, but it’s dark, the canopy of the trees melding together above him. He can still see enough to be following the boy in front of him, the first thing to make him recognize he’s a teenager again. It’s his voice next.

“Where are we  _ going _ ?” he asks, impatient, and the boy in front of him laughs.

“It’s a surprise, Dean” he says, like he’s already said it before but he doesn’t mind saying it again. There’s a break in the darkness ahead, and the boy darts through the trees. “Come on!”

Dean runs after him.

It’s dark. Dean has the gun his dad left in his hand. He shouldn’t be out here. He’s following a light. It keeps winding around the trees and up into the sky. Dean tries not to make any noise as he walks, but he can’t see the twigs on the ground before he’s stepped on them. The light hasn’t made any sound until now, when it screams. It sounds like a person.

Dean isn’t a kid, and there’s nobody with him. He’s waiting. He remembered, he thinks, but there’s still dread waiting to prove to him this was a terrible idea. It’s been a year—a whole year this time—and he feels like he’s been waiting here just as long, on the sagging steps of 204 Whip-Poor-Will Lane. He feels the air shift, the rush of a breeze, and in front of him stands the man from the diner. The sight makes him smile, even as nerves swoops in his stomach.

“Hey, Cas.”

Dean sits up in bed with a gasp, scaring Vida off her perch. His heart is racing like he’d just had a nightmare instead of...whatever that was, he thinks, alarm bells going off in his head. Vida lands between his knees and rumbles at him. He focuses on her, and he—he knows her. He remembers her small and covered in fuzz, being fed mushed grasshoppers and raw meat. He remembers the boy who fed her with fingers that were constantly stained green.

“Cas,” he says quietly, and it feels like something’s been ripped straight out of his chest. Vida caws, hopping out of the way as he gets out of bed to grab the motel notepad.  _ Cas _ , he writes, and then stares at the letters like they’re a different language. A language he’s heard before, but not one he’s fluent in. He pulls the paper off the pad. He remembers, and he doesn’t. 

Vida snatches the paper from his fingers. Dean makes an aborted noise of protest, cut off by the door opening on its own for her to fly out. It was just locked to high heavens. He watches it shut again, the locks clicking. 

“Cas,” he says again, surprised at his own exasperation. Part of him knows how to do this, even if the rest of him forgot.

The rest of him doesn’t forget for long. It feels like he blinks and everything changes. In one instance, there were pieces missing, a haze of confusion over the whole situation. In the next, he’s fighting past a headache that he’s had a dozen times now, one for each time he’s come back since he was seventeen, and easy as anything he can recall Cas and Cheryl and the house on Whip-Poor-Will Lane. The deal that Cas and Dad made, to make Dean forget, because killing something like Cas came with consequences, and Dad hadn’t known how to do it back then. 

Dean doesn’t remember the fire because he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there, because he’d already forgotten again—because Dad had gotten Sam to keep him away long enough to lose the memory of Cas so that Dean wouldn’t go back and keep him from trying to burn the whole place down. Dean thinks of all the ash, the dead spot around where the house used to be, the way Cas had walked with Cheryl like it hurt, and he hurts, a clenching around his heart that doesn’t let up until he’s on the road to Back Creek.


	2. BEFORE

When Dean was twelve and Sam was almost eight, Dad drove them from Texas to Virginia, to a backwoods town called Back Creek. He didn’t tell Dean what he was hunting, but he showed him how to set snare traps and told him not to go out in the woods until he said it was safe. He would stay out all night and come back in time to fall asleep before the bus rumbled down the road to take them to school. One night, Dean saw a light outside the house, darting around the trees.

He followed it, and it screamed, and when he went to see what it was, he found a boy. A regular looking boy in a t-shirt and shorts, who was bleeding and digging his fingers into the ground to keep himself from dangling in the air by the leg. Dean pointed the gun at him for less than two seconds, hearing the pain on each of the boy’s huffed breaths, and ran back to the house to grab the wire cutters Dad left in the kitchen. 

When he came back, the boy had been dragged back, deep grooves where his fingers carved through the dirt, and he watched Dean’s approach like he still expected to be shot.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Dean told him. “I’m just gonna cut the wire, okay?”

The boy just watched him, and when Dean cut him loose, he collapsed on the ground with a cry of pain. The wire had tightened so tight around his leg, Dean could only cut what was hanging from the tree without cutting the boy’s calf. Dean couldn’t be sure, because his face was pressed to the ground, but he thought the boy might have been crying. He crouched next to him.

“I’m pretty good at patching people up,” Dean said, even though he had no idea how he was supposed to get the wire out. “We have a whole kit in the house, I can take you there.”

The boy shook his head, pushing himself up without using his injured leg. “He’ll kill me,” he said, which was almost as alarming as the tears Dean could see glowing on his cheeks. Dad. Dad was hunting this boy.

Dean still had the gun, hooked in the back of his pants. He watched the boy try to stand and left the gun where it was to catch him before he fell. The boy grabbed his arms too tight.

“Do you live back here?” Dean asked. 

“I’m stuck,” the boy said nonsensically. He was going to leave bruises on Dean’s arms if he held on any longer. Dean watched a new wave of glowing tears building in his eyes. “I’m stuck,” he said again, more panicked.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Dean said. What was he doing? Dad was going to kill  _ him _ when he found out. “Let me help, I can help. Just tell me where you live, and I’ll take you there.”

A bad idea. It was close to midnight, and he didn’t know his way around yet. The boy shook his head again, looking like Dean might as well be pointing the gun in his face.

“Okay,” Dean said, trying to talk to him like he’d talk to Sam if he was hurt. “Okay, how about a phone number? Your parents? Someone who could come get you?”

The boy was still breathing too fast, but he met Dean’s eyes, and, oh, it wasn’t just the tears glowing. “A phone number,” he said. “I know one. I know one. You won’t tell him, will you? You can’t tell him.”

“No,” Dean said. “I won’t tell him.”

So the boy told him the number and Dean repeated it under his breath until he was sure he had it, helping the boy to sit as he did.

“Do you have a name?” Dean asked, which made the boy look up at him again. “For whoever I’m calling to know it’s about you.”

“You can’t tell him,” the boy said again. Dean nodded. He wasn’t going to tell his dad  _ any  _ of this. The boy still hesitated. “My name is Castiel,” he said finally.

“Castiel,” Dean repeated. “I’m Dean.”

The boy nodded, sagging back against the tree Dean had propped him on, and Dean ran for the house. A woman answered the phone the second time he called. As soon as Dean said Castiel, she hung up. He hoped that meant she was on her way. He checked that Sammy was still asleep before he went back out, only to find that the boy was gone.

They only stayed in Back Creek for two weeks that first time, and Dean was worried that meant Dad killed Castiel. He shouldn’t have been worried; if Dad was hunting him, there had to be a reason. But Castiel had looked so scared. On their way out of town, they stopped in Daphne’s Diner, where Dean saw Castiel for the second time, sitting at a table by the kitchen doors. Dean couldn’t help his relief, and as they waited for their food, Dean tried to watch him like Dad had been teaching him. 

Sitting alone in the diner, Castiel just looked like a boy, like he had when Dean first found him, before he noticed the glow. Dean was spotted almost instantly. Castiel watched him back with wide eyes that definitely weren’t glowing, only looking away when the waitress stopped at his table and redirected his attention to the book open in front of him by literally bowing his head, ruffling his hair when he swatted at her. She looked where he’d been looking, and Dean wasn’t fast enough to look away. 

The waitress, Cheryl, waited until Dad was paying the check at the register and Sam was in the bathroom to bring Dean a small box. “Tell your daddy it’s on the house,” she said with a smile, and Dean opened the box to find a piece of the pie Dad wouldn’t let him get because he wanted to leave already.

“Thank you,” Dean said, because among other things he was raised to be polite. 

Cheryl glanced toward Castiel, smile softening, and tapped Dean on the shoulder with her pen. “Any time, sweet pea.”

Castiel became Cas the summer Dean was seventeen. It was a long stay in Back Creek that summer, starting when school let out in Ohio to a few weeks into the next school year. Dean still wasn’t told what Dad was looking for, but he knew it could have been Castiel, which made it all the more surprising when Castiel approached Dean in the diner. Granted, Dad wasn’t there at the time, but Sam was, shooting Castiel a curious frown when he stopped at their table.

“Hello,” Castiel said gravely.

“Hi,” Dean said just as seriously, almost losing it when Castiel’s eyebrows jumped in surprise.

“Cheryl has informed me I need to make friends my own age,” Castiel said.

Dean looked past Castiel and found Cheryl watching through her fingers at the counter like she was watching a car wreck. He managed to keep his serious face in place. “I see,” he said, and he’d never really been one for making friends, but he’d never seen such a direct approach. “And do  _ you  _ want friends your own age?”

“I see no problem in friends being ‘old enough to be your grandparents,’” Castiel said, with some impressively attitude-filled air quotes. Dean saw Cheryl cover her face with both hands. 

“Age is just a number,” Sam said sagely, glancing at Dean like he wasn’t sure what was happening, and Dean lost his battle to keep a straight face.

“Well, if it’ll make Cheryl happy, consider us friends,” Dean said. “I’m Dean,” he added, in case Castiel didn’t remember. “This is Sam.”

“Castiel,” Castiel said to Sam.

“Nice to meet you,” Sam said. Castiel nodded and walked back to the counter, where Cheryl reached over and grabbed his shoulders, jostling him as she spoke too quietly for Dean to overhear. Sam looked at him with a confused smile. “That was weird, right?”

Dean laughed. “Yeah, it was weird,” he said. And kind of cute, he didn’t add, because Sam didn’t need to know everything. He glanced over at Castiel, now seated and opening a book. In front of him, Cheryl looked like she might start pulling her hair out.

The next time they went to the diner, a week later, Dad went with them. Castiel was seated behind the register, and Dean paid while Dad went to the bathroom. Sam had already gone out to the car, annoyed with Dad for existing it seemed. 

“Well, if it isn’t my new friend,” Dean said with a smile.

Castiel didn’t smile back as he took the cash from Dean’s hand. “Hello, Dean.”

“I’m kinda curious,” Dean said, and Castiel paused his fight with the register to look at him. Dean took that as encouragement. “What do you talk about with your friends that are old enough to be your grandparents?”

Castiel narrowed his eyes, and Dean kept his face as judgment free as possible. He really was curious; he didn’t know anyone that old. Apparently his face passed inspection.

“Gardening,” Castiel said, smacking an open palm on the register. The drawer slid open with a ding, and he sorted the bills to their appropriate places.

“Gardening,” Dean repeated, garnering that narrow-eyed look again. He held up his hands. “Nothing wrong with gardening. I just don’t know anything about it.”

“I’m crusading for native plants,” Castiel said, sounding like he expected Dean to laugh at him.

“Crusading, wow. So you’re one of those environmentalists?”

Castiel finally smiled, something small but amused as he held out Dean’s change. “Something like that.”

“Cool,” Dean said. He could imagine Castiel’s eyes glowing when he smiled. He caught sight of his dad coming out of the bathroom and rapped a knuckle on the register as he turned to go. “You’ll have to fill me in on your crusade sometime. I expect to be a grandparent-level friend by the time we leave town.”

Castiel rolled his eyes as Dean left, but the next time he went to the diner, alone, while Sam was sulking at the house and Dad was out doing god knows what, Castiel sat next to him at the counter and guided him through a book of native plants and told him how each one was beneficial to the overall environment. Dean had never thought much about plants, but Castiel was passionate enough for the both of them, and Dean liked listening to him say the more ridiculous names like they pained him. 

“Humans have the worst naming conventions,” Castiel said at one point.

“What names things better?” Dean asked.

Castiel considered it. “Birds.” He nodded, like he was agreeing with himself. “They’re very direct.”

“You talk to a lot of birds, then,” Dean said. 

“They mainly talk to me,” Castiel said, glancing at Dean before he turned the page. He pointed to a pentagon shaped flower and carried on like he hadn’t just said something intensely weird. “Mountain laurel. It might be my favorite.”

“Don’t let the other plants hear you say that,” Dean said, and Castiel smiled.

Dean became a regular at the diner. It wasn’t a good idea, for a lot of reasons, and he knew it. But the house was boring, and Sam was angry and annoying all the time, and Dean liked getting to know not only Castiel but all the other regulars. It wasn’t long before they started including him in their rounds before they sat down to eat, and Cheryl kept giving him free pie and looked at him like she was grateful every time she saw him talking to Castiel. 

“Do you still go running around the woods at night?” Dean had asked one day, and Castiel had said, “It isn’t running,” which prompted Dean to say, “Show me.”

So Castiel showed him, met him in the woods behind the house, and warned him, “I’m told it looks alarming at first.”

Dean told him to get on with it already, and then Castiel started glowing in tiny lines all over his body until his body fell away and Dean was looking at a shifting ball of blue-white light. The light hovered level with his face for a moment while he stared, slack-jawed, and then it spun around him and flew into the trees. Like,  _ into _ the trees, absorbing into the cracks of the bark, and then the branches were swaying with a breeze that wasn’t there. Dean had never seen anything like it. He’d never seen anything like Castiel.

The light that was Castiel spilled out of the leaves and back into the body on the ground. His eyes glowed when he opened them, watching Dean evenly once he’d sat up.

“Holy shit,” Dean said. “You’re actually magic.”

Castiel rolled his eyes. “Magic implies something artificial.”

“You’re not possessing someone, are you?” Dean asked suddenly. He hadn’t been looking at Castiel’s body while he was out of it, couldn’t tell if it had had another person in it.

“No,” Castiel said. “My body is my own. I’m simply not limited to inhabiting it alone.”

“What else can you  _ inhabit _ ?”

Castiel shrugged. “Anything with life in it.”

“Right,” Dean said. “Okay. That’s—Aren’t you worried? That I’ll tell my dad?”

Castiel stood, shrugging again. “You didn’t tell him before. And now we’re friends.”

He didn’t sound hesitant when he said it. It was like he was telling Dean the sky was blue. Dean nodded. It was weird—everything about Castiel was, if Dean thought about him too hard, so he just nodded again and said, “We’re friends,” and Cas beamed. Literally. Dean was going to have to get used to this.

After that first night, Cas used his magic-that-wasn’t-magic around Dean like it was normal. And it was, for Cas. Soon enough it was normal for Dean, and he decided he liked it, almost as much as he liked Cas himself, which, he could admit to himself, was probably too much. He didn’t know when Dad would be done with whatever he was after—hopefully not Cas, even though Cas didn’t seem worried—so he didn’t know when they’d pick up and leave. It had already been a month and a half. Dean let himself hope they’d stay longer.

He started bring Sam with him to the diner, because there was only so much sulking one angry teen could do, and Cheryl made it her mission to cheer him up with baked goods and lemonade. It worked. Being in the house with him when they had to go back became more tolerable until Dad would come back, and Sam would get angry all over again.

“I could show him a magic trick,” Cas offered on a day when Dean felt like shaking Sam until he just calmed down for once. 

Dean snorted and won the fifth game of tic tac toe in a row. Cas picked up a new napkin and drew the grid again, his hand stiff around the pen. 

“I don’t think knowing I’ve been keeping something from him would make him any less mad,” Dean informed him. Cas put an X in the top right corner. Dean put an O in the center. “But thanks.”

Cheryl came out from the back of the diner with her apron already off, her hair out of its ponytail. She ruffled Cas’ hair before planting a kiss on his temple. “I expect you to be home when I get back. No later than ten,” she said.

“Eleven,” Cas said.

“ _ Ten _ ,” Cheryl insisted, shaking him lightly with an arm around his shoulders. “We’re already pushing the curfew; I don’t need Mrs. Mullins judging me for letting you run wild any more than she already does.”

“Fine,” Cas conceded, and Cheryl smiled in triumph. She knocked Dean’s shoulder on her way past.

“Feel free to hang out at our place,” she told them. “I certainly wouldn’t mind knowing where y’all were.”

She left before Dean could figure out how he was supposed to respond. You thanked people for invitations to their house, right?

“You don’t have to come over,” Cas said, placing another X on the napkin.

Dean blocked his attempt at the top row with another O. He shrugged. “I’ve got nothing else on my calendar today.”

Cas tried to take the right column. Dean connected his O’s in the middle column. Cas frowned and crumpled the napkin.

“You can meet the Verrucas,” he said, mood rallying as he slid off the stool. 

Dean followed him outside. “The Verrucas? Like the girl from Willy Wonka?”

“Like warts,” Cas said, laughing when Dean made a face. “They’re toads. They live under the porch.”

Dean met the toads, small, rust-colored ones that had the grumpiest faces he’d ever seen. Until a week later when Cas found a baby raven. It had wispy feathers, like a balding old guy, and when it looked straight up at Dean from the safety of Cas’ cupped palms, it looked like it was about to tell him off for daring to look back.

“Isn’t she perfect?” Cas said, ducking his head to press his nose to the top of the raven’s head. It bit him. Dean laughed.

“She’s something,” he said. 

Cheryl wouldn’t let Cas take the raven—Vida, he named her, for Corvidae, and Dean had to suppress some fondness when he called him a nerd—into the diner, so Dean had met Cas at their house, which was quickly becoming another local haunt. Cas had fashioned a nest for Vida out of a shoebox, strips of fabric, and fur of unknown origin, but most of the time, he would hold her or let her sit in his lap or even in his hair. Dean didn’t fancy himself squeamish, but he had to say he wasn’t a fan of feeding time, when Cas would lure bugs out of the yard to squish in his bare hands and offer pieces to Vida. 

“I thought you didn’t like killing things,” Dean said the first, and unfortunately not last, time he witnessed it.

“I can tell when they’re nearing the end,” Cas said.

“Is that because you’re going to end up squishing them?”

Cas shrugged. “Some things just are,” he said, which was how he talked about himself when Dean asked about his magic. He just was, and that was answer enough for him.

Dean saw Cas most every day of the week for two months straight. Vida grew downy feathers and then sleek feathers, and while she still begged Cas for food, she was becoming a proficient hunter on her own. She could keep up in the trees when Cas just  _ had _ to show Dean something so far in the woods, Dean was sure it wouldn’t be worth it until it was, not because Dean found glowing mushrooms so fascinating but because Cas was so excited to show him. It was easy to be enthusiastic with Cas, to follow him on trails made by deer and wade into the shallowest parts of the creek with Cas’ ensurance he’d keep the leeches away.

On one such outing, Cas had practically been glowing in the midday sun when Dean got to his and Cheryl’s house, Vida perched on his shoulder like a pirate. He wouldn’t tell Dean what they were going to look at, but he tugged Dean away from the house until he trailed after him willingly. They ended up at one of the deeper parts of the creek, where a fallen tree made a bridge from one bank to the other. Cas walked out first, as confidently as he walked on any other surface, and sat in the middle. Dean stayed on the bank.

“You brought me out here to dangle over class II rapids?” he said in the face of Cas’ confusion at not being followed. 

“If anything, these are class I rapids,” Cas said, rolling his eyes. He stood and walked back to Dean, holding out his hands, and said, too earnestly, “I would never let you fall.”

Dean could see, in the shade from the trees, that Cas’ eyes were glowing. He sighed his defeat and took Cas’ hands. It would’ve been easier, he realizes, if he’d taken off his boots. Cas was going barefoot, as he did everywhere but the diner, and it probably helped his freakishly good balance to be able to feel the curve of the tree beneath him. But it was too late now, so Dean took tiny steps, and Cas lent his power over the air to keep him from leaning too far to either side. Like bowling with bumpers, Dean thought, and laughed. 

Sitting was the worst part. Cas folded himself down so easily, but Dean had to let go of him to crouch and then turn and get his legs out from underneath him. He felt the air holding him steady, but it was still nerve-wracking when he let go of the tree at the wrong time and wobbled. They weren’t even that far above the water, but Dean preferred to have the ground right under his feet. Cas smiled at him when he was settled and directed his attention to the water.

It mostly looked brown, but there was a spot in the sun where they could see straight through to the bottom. Dean watched a brook trout dart downstream, colors flashing in the light, and then another and another.

“All we need now are fishing poles,” Dean said. 

Cas rolled his eyes. “You humans and your insistence on  _ catching _ ,” he said. A second later, he did one of his coolest tricks and diverted the water of the stream up at a gentle incline until the fish were swimming over the tree between them. 

Dean got distracted from the fish by the way Cas was lit up from the inside, peeks of light spilling out of the corners of his mouth when he smiled at Dean. 

“Put the water back for a second?” Dean said. Cas’ smile dimmed, but he did. As soon as the space between them was clear, Dean leaned over and kissed him. Cas lit up like the sun.

It didn’t last.

Dean heard the crack of a gunshot, and Cas jerked forward, sending Dean into the creek. The water wasn’t as deep as he thought; his head cracked against a rock, and everything went black.

He woke up on his side in the grass with Cas dripping over him, saying something over and over. Dean reached out and found his wrist, squeezed it as he coughed and gagged. There was red across Cas’ shirt. The gunshot. Dean tried to touch it, but Cas caught his hand.

“I’m okay,” he said, holding Dean’s hand too tight. His voice came from inside an echo chamber. It was getting dark again. “I’m okay. Dean? Dean!”

He woke up in a hospital. Cas. He scrambled to sit up, and it jostled his brain, his vision whiting out as something was shoved into his hands. He threw up into it, and his ribs felt like they’d been stepped on by a giant. There was a voice talking to him, frantic. Not Cas. Sam. Dean took breaths as deep as he could manage with his ribs protesting and his throat burning. He looked up, and Sam was pale, eyes huge.

“I’m okay,” Dean said. It sounded like he’d been gargling gravel. He spit into the trash can Sam had given him and leaned heavily on the bed. “Cas,” he huffed. “Is Cas okay?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. Wrong answer, Dean thought, and started pushing himself up again, slower. It hurt, god, he must have landed on his knee, too, but he was able to get upright on the floor despite Sam’s protests. “You’re not supposed to get up! Dean, stop!”

Dean couldn’t see the way to the door through the black spots crowding his vision. He dropped into the chair Sam had been in, letting his head rock back even though that hurt, too. “Where’s Dad?”

“He said he had to go somewhere and he would be right back,” Sam said, hovering over Dean like he wasn’t sure what to do. “Dean, what happened? Why were you in the woods by yourself?”

“I was—” He wasn’t, he wanted to say. He was out with—no one. No. There was— His head was screaming. “I was alone,” he said.  _ No _ . “I was alone.”

“Dean,” Sam said, grabbing his shoulders. Dean was alone. He felt himself falling, and Sam calling his name from a hundred miles away. “Dean!”

A crow followed them out of town. Dad muttered under his breath about shooting it, and Dean felt a spike of panic, because—because—the crow didn’t do anything wrong, he thought. It would’ve been pointless to kill it for just existing. He watched it in the side mirror, head pillowed by Dad’s jacket against the window, and couldn’t help feeling a little sad when it turned back.

There were notes in Dean’s bag. He found them after Dad left to pick up dinner, ordering Dean to stay put and Sam to make sure of it. One of the few times Dean decided to go off on his own, and he’d almost killed himself in a river. So Dean started sorting through his stuff, because it had all been thrown together, and he found notes. The handwriting was atrocious, but he ran a finger over it like the words were precious. They were all signed  _ C _ . 

  1. Dean frowned.

C for— 

“Cas,” he mumbled. He’d. He said that, when he was in the hospital.

“What?” Sam said.

“Cas,” Dean repeated, louder. For some reason, Sam got pale. Cas. Dean—he forgot, how could he forget? He ran for the phone, and Sam tried to stop him.

“Dean, don’t! He’s not your friend!”

But Dean was still bigger, even if he was moving slower, and he locked himself in the bathroom with the phone and dialed Cheryl’s number with shaky hands. Cas had been shot, Cas had been  _ shot _ , and if it was his Dad, he’ll never— 

“Hello?” Cheryl said. Dean couldn’t tell if she was grieving from one word.

“Is Cas okay?” Dean asked. He could hear Sam fumbling with the lock and pressed his back against the door.

“Dean?” Cheryl said, sounding more confused than anything. “You shouldn’t know this number.”

“What? Cheryl, just tell me if he’s okay, please, and I’ll—I’ll never call again, I’m sorry, just. Please.”

“He’s okay,” Cheryl said after a pause where Sam got the door unlocked. Dean locked it again before he could turn the handle. “He’s safe. You can’t—Dean, you can’t call here again. I don’t know how you remembered, but you  _ cannot _ call here again.”

“Okay,” Dean said, even though it was anything but. “Okay, but, do you know, was it my dad? Did my dad shoot him?”

“No,” Cheryl said. “Honey, the shooting was an accident. Your dad came by after, and—I have to go. Don’t tell him you called. Don’t mention Castiel. Promise you won’t.”

“I won’t,” Dean said, because he hadn’t told his dad about Cas yet, and he wasn’t about to start now. “I promise,” he added, but Cheryl had already hung up. 

Sam got the door unlocked again and shoved. Dean let him open it. His dad found Cheryl. He knew about Cas. Dean wasn’t going to say a word. Dad found the notes after dinner and burned them while Dean did his best not to react.

When he woke up the next morning, he didn’t remember a thing about the night before, uneasily chalked it up to the head wound, and didn’t say a word to Dad about it. It would only make him worry.

The next time he remembered was harder. He was nineteen, and he’d been driving from Richmond to Pittsburgh solo when he made a stop in Harrison. The name made him pause. They’d stayed there, hadn’t they? Or, no, it was somewhere near there. He found Back Creek by noon and the diner fifteen minutes later, and when he saw Cas, he didn’t recognize him at all, but he flirted anyway, and Cas had booked it, and when Cheryl saw him, she was as polite as anything, even though he could see she was tense. It took him another night to remember, and when he did, he just left, because Cas hadn’t wanted to see him, did he, and what was the point of staying otherwise?

It took two more rememberings and three more years for Dean to get the whole story out of Cas. After he fished Dean out of the creek, he took him to the house on Whip-Poor-Will, because he knew his dad was there for once, and they were closer to the house than the hospital. His dad had known Cas wasn’t human, had, in fact, been hunting him for something Cas didn’t disclose until the next time Dean found him, and he’d threatened to shoot him with a better bullet if he didn’t make Dean forget all about him. So Cas had gotten Cheryl to channel his not-magic into a memory spell, and Dean forgot until he got little reminders, things that made his brain wire back to know Cas.

Dean tried to write himself reminders after that, leave them in places he’d find them again, but as soon as he fell asleep outside Back Creek, he’d forget again. 

The last time Dean remembered before his dad died, it had been a year since he’d left Back Creek, and he’d only been in town for a day, had known Cas again for a day before Bobby called with a case. Cas was never wary about letting him back in, and Dean was always convinced that this time, it would stick. He would remember, and he wouldn’t have to put Cas through the forgetting again. This time, when Dean came back, Cas was tired. He and Dean fought, somehow both of them arguing for Dean to just leave and neither of them winning.

So Dean stayed in the house on Whip-Poor-Will, and Cas stayed with him, and by the time Dean’s dad started to try and get in touch with him, Dean had decided never to leave. Hunting could screw itself, Dean was  _ happy _ . He called his dad back anyway, getting his voicemail every time, which Dean took as a sign. 

And then his dad showed up, with Sam, and Dean had to pretend he was on some case in the neighboring county and just got caught up. Sam had only asked to catch up, but Dean ended up spending the night outside Back Creek, and in the morning, he had no clue he was wanted elsewhere, had the vague idea that he and Sam had teamed up looking for Dad, and were on their way back west when they got hit by a truck.


	3. after-after

Dean drives straight up to Cheryl’s house. If she wants to curse him again, fine, but he’s not leaving until he sees Cas for himself. Luckily for him, Cas is already outside, sitting under the porch light. Dean hardly remembers to shut off Baby’s engine before he’s getting out. Cas has barely stood up by the time Dean reaches him, but he wraps Dean in one of his octopus hugs, just as tight as Dean remembers, and Dean breathes shakily into his shoulder. _ He’s okay, he’s okay, he’s okay. _

“I’m sorry,” Dean says. It comes out muffled against Cas’ shoulder. 

Cas holds him impossibly tighter. “It wasn’t you,” he says, and his voice sounds even rougher than usual. 

Dean pulls back to look at him, and Cas lets him, easy as anything. His eyes aren’t glowing like usual, and he looks tired, so tired. Dean puts a hand on either side of his face, thumbs running over the shadows under his eyes. 

“Are you okay?” Dean asks. He knows Cas knows, but he adds, “I went to the house, and nothing’s growing back.”

Cas tips their foreheads together, hands hooking in the crooks of Dean’s elbows. “I’m recovering. Slowly, but recovering nonetheless.”

“I’m sorry,” Dean says, and it comes out as a whisper. “I tried to come back, I knew something was wrong—”

“It wasn’t you,” Cas repeats, and Dean is the one to pull him close this time, just to be sure.

Cas leads Dean into the house, to the room that’s been his on and off since Cheryl took him in. Dean has been here dozens of times, but he’s never felt so much like he has to tiptoe through the place. Cheryl isn’t just angry at his dad, she’s angry at  _ him _ . He gets it. As much as she warmed up to him, Cas was like her baby brother, her Sam, and Dean can see how his part in Cas’ life looks from the outside, even knowing about the spell to keep him from remembering.

Vida is roosting on her perch in the corner of Cas’ room, and she keeps sleeping peacefully when they come in, Dean shutting the door as quietly as he can. Cas doesn’t shed any of his three layers before he lays on the bed and tugs Dean down with him. He takes Dean’s hands and finds new scars, running his fingers over them like he can make them disappear. It almost makes Dean feel like crying.

“Your eyes,” he says, and Cas looks up at him. “Are you—did it—”

“It’ll come back,” Cas says. His magic that he didn’t like to call magic. As if he’s reading Dean’s mind, he adds, “I’m mostly human. One form only for now.”

All of Dean’s air leaves him in a rush. Cas lets go of one of his hands to cover Dean’s mouth.

“I know you’re sorry,” he says, exasperated. “Would you like to know what would make me feel better than another apology?”

Dean nods.

“If you would stay with me while I sleep,” Cas says. Dean nods again. Cas removes the hand from his mouth and turns so his back is to Dean, scooting back until they’re pressed together. He pulls Dean’s arm over his side and holds it to his chest. Dean rests his forehead on the back of Cas’ neck. Cas sighs. “Thank you.”

It doesn’t take long for Cas’ breathing to even out, his grip on Dean’s arm loosening. Dean closes his eyes and listens as his breaths hitch into snores he still denies, feels his heartbeat under his palm. Cas has had months to get used to this. Dean has only known him to sleep twice before, and it was when he wore himself out helping a sick baby deer and a wounded raccoon, despite his claims that he was about balance. It wasn’t their times, so instead of letting them pass, he’d thrown as much magic at them as he could, and both animals were able to walk away while Dean had practically carried Cas back to the house on Whip-Poor-Will Lane.

That was different. This wasn’t Cas choosing to help. This was his dad attacking him, and Dean knows Cas; he’d probably spent so much magic making sure nothing else was in the path of the fire there was nothing left for himself. If John wasn’t dead, he and Dean would be having words. Dean thinks them viciously at him anyway until it feels less like he’s going to burst at the seams.

Cas shifts in his sleep, pulling Dean’s arm tighter again. Dean breathes. Cas is okay. Cas will get better. And Dean is going to be here while he does.


	4. epilogue

Cas comes with him to Bobby’s. He’s never been this far from Back Creek, but the benefit of having his magic drained is that it doesn’t hurt, not while he’s with Dean, and not while he has his charms from Cheryl, even if Cheryl disapproves of the trip. Dean won’t forget him this time, because the deal with his dad died with him, but he doesn’t want to risk it. Not yet. Not when he just got Cas back. He’d called to ask-slash-warn Bobby beforehand that he’d be bringing Cas, but he hadn’t thought about telling Sam, because Sam knew Cas, too.

What ensues, when Dean gets to Bobby’s after Sam, with an arm over Cas’ shoulders, is a minor hullabaloo.

“Sam!” Dean exclaims, pulling Cas behind him because Sam’s got a  _ gun  _ pointed at him. “What the fuck, put the gun down!”

Sam lowered it as soon as Dean got in the way, but he looks like he’s ready to shoot if Dean changes his mind. “He tried to kill you, Dean!”

Dean looks back at Cas with a frown, as if Cas will own up to attempted murder. “ _ When? _ ”

“When we were kids,” Sam says, sounding less sure. “Dad said he put a spell on you or something and tried to drown you in the creek.”

Dean blinks. And then he laughs. “And you believed that? Sam, you  _ met _ Cas back then. You knew him.”

Sam lets the gun hang at his side now, still not totally sure. “You almost died,” he says, and okay, yeah, Dean would probably have believed it, too, coming from Dad while Sam was in the hospital.

“Cas never put a spell on me,” Dean says, trying to sound less like he was just laughing. He holds up a hand. “Hand to god, you don’t have to worry about him.”

“ _ He’s _ right here,” Cas mumbles, and Dean swats at him gently.

Sam hesitates, and then he nods and sticks the gun in his waistband. “Sorry,” he tells Cas.

“I understand the urge to protect Dean,” Cas replies serenely.

“Y’all done having a standoff out there, or should I start looking for a place to bury the body?” Bobby calls from the doorway. 

“No bodies to bury!” Dean calls back, shooting Sam a look. Sam holds up his hands, looking embarrassed now. Dean takes Cas’ hand again (he’s not sure which of them needs the comfort more) and follows Sam back to the house. “Bobby, Cas, Cas, Bobby.”

Bobby eyes Cas critically for a second, barely looking at their joined hands. “For some kinda nature deity, you don’t look like much.”

Cas just smiles. “I’m not at my best right now, but I would be happy to demonstrate my abilities when I’ve recovered. I’m very good at growing poisonous plants.”

Bobby raises an eyebrow at the  _ barely even veiled threat, Cas, what the fuck _ , Dean thinks, squeezing his hand. 

“Hmph,” Bobby says. “Maybe you will come in handy. Come on in, leave any poisonous plants in the yard, if you don’t mind.”

Cas’ smile grows as he turns a triumphant look on Dean.

“Shut up,” Dean says, dropping his hand to prod him through the door. “You just signed yourself up to be a supplier.”

“I like being helpful,” Cas says.

“I’ll show you helpful,” Dean mutters nonsensically.

“Quit flirtin’ and make yourself useful,” Bobby says, tapping a stack of books on the kitchen table as he passes it. “Garth’s up against something that keeps screaming at him in Greek.”

“He recognizes Greek but not the monster?” Dean says, pulling a chair around the table so he can sit next to Cas, who dutifully opens a book written in Greek, which Dean knows he learned out of boredom one winter. 

Sam shrugs, settling on the couch in the next room. “Must not be one of the famous ones.”

Dean finds a book written in English and sighs as he flips it open. Cas rests a hand on his leg, absent-mindedly rubbing his thumb over his knee while he reads. He supposes this research won’t be all bad. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading!  
if you want some sporadic, not-spoiler-free spn content on tumblr, you can find me at winkingwinchesters :)

**Author's Note:**

> **additional warning (spoilers)**  
a memory spell is cast on dean without his knowledge when he is 17 so that he forgets cas. cas is involved in the spell-casting to protect his own life. dean goes through the process of remembering and forgetting cas multiple times, but by the end, the spell is broken and the memories stick.
> 
> title of this fic is from dance dance by cage the elephant because it was stuck in my head while posting ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


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